Wednesday, 26 March 2014

Vol. 9, No. 4 of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT at http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html) has been published and is available online. The contents of the issue are listed below. In this issue you will find 12 articles concerned with various aspects of online learning and teaching.

It is a nice set of articles, embracing social media for online learning, gender-based barriers for men in online nursing (nice twist), student preference for asynchronous content delivery ...

The one article that immediately caught my attention - because it is related to my own research - was the paper by Rowe and Rafferty on self-regulated learning (SRL), and especially how instructors and learning designers might tweak their online courses in order to enhance or support self-regulated learning. The authors also share an instrument they used for SRL (nice).

From the abstract of the paper:

"Theories and models about self-regulated learning are important to educators attempting to understand why some learners succeed and others have difficulty in academic settings. Understanding self-regulation in e-learning environments is critical because there is much agreement in the literature that e-learning requires a higher degree of self-regulation than face-to-face learning. Furthermore, empirical studies of the effects of self-regulated learning intervention on learning outcomes of students in elearning environments indicate that support for self-regulated learning fosters significantly higher academic outcomes. In this paper, the authors will focus on: (1) what educators should know about the different types of self-regulated learning interventions that have been studied; and (2) how educators might apply self-regulated learning interventions to the design of e-learning environments in order to support self-regulated learning processes."